ARISE-US Publishes a New Community Wildfire Disaster Resilience Scorecard
Wildfire
By Dr Peter Williams chairs ARISE-US. His background includes 30 years in IBM, where he became an IBM Distinguished Engineer, and extensive experience in creating DRR tools such as the UN City Disaster Resilience Scorecard and its many offshoots, now used by hundreds of cities (and countries) globally. His PhD is in Politics.
ARISE-US and CrowdDoing are delighted to announce the publication of a new Community Wildfire Resilience Scorecard, as of July 27th 2023. The Scorecard, which is free to use and includes a spreadsheet tool for capturing scores, was the work of ARISE-US and CrowdDoing volunteers over about a year. Wildfires have certainly elbowed their way to the front of the mind when it comes to thinking about disaster risk and resilience.
With repeated wildfire events in recent years in southern Europe and the Mediterranean region, in Australia and in North & South America, the realization growing that very few communities, unless perhaps they are deep inside a major urban area, are immune to this risk. The most recent events in Canada and above all in Hawaii only serve to underline this. About 18 months ago, ARISE-US held a symposium on wildfire risk and how to reduce it. This concluded that there is masses of information and advice on wildfire risk management and reduction, but that these resources are fragmented and incompatible, with the result that communities struggle to identify the best course of action.
ARISE-US and CrowdDoing accordingly decided to create a Community Wildfire toolkit, of which the Scorecard is the first module. The Scorecard is modeled on the UN DRR's earlier City Disaster Resilience Scorecard, now used by some 400 cities globally, and is designed to assess strengths and weaknesses at the individual property, neighborhood or community, and landscape scales. Based on the UN DRR's "Ten Essentials for Making Cities Resilient" we believe that the Wildfire scorecard is more holistic than other such instruments. This is in no way to attack those other instruments (for example, from Firewise and regional Fire Safe councils), which offer thoughtful, well presented and extremely valuable, indeed potentially life-saving, information: rather, it just reflects the fact that we wanted also to cover some of wider features of wildfire risk reduction such as the financial architecture, urban design guidelines and planning in advance for post event recovery.
Where communities have already used any of these other instruments, they should use data they have amassed to speed the completion of the new Scorecard. The timing of the publication of the Scorecard, coming as it did only a few days before the tragedy at Lahaina, HI, is poignant. Lahaina (a coastal town on a sub-tropical island) and Paradise, CA, (a mountain town set in coniferous forests that suffered a catastrophic fire in 2018) are very different places, and I don't want to "armchair quarterback" the response to either disaster. However if newspaper reports are to be believed the similarities between the two events are dismaying. In both events:
Electrical transmission equipment failing and coming into contact with trees is either known (Paradise), or suspected (Lahaina), to be a cause;
Drought played a major role, in desiccating the landscape;
High winds played a major role, in fanning the flames;
The fires were exacerbated by land use management practices such as allowing flammable non-native grasses to take over former farmland (Lahaina), or suppressing fires such that fuel loads then allowed the fire to balloon in size and ferocity (Paradise);
Warning systems may or may not have been fully effective;
Escape routes were inadequate for the required evacuations;
Water systems proved inadequate for firefighting.
And so on. It's a grim account of how, in the absence of learning from experience, history will repeat itself. We sincerely hope that the accumulated experience that went into the Wildfire Scorecard, alongside other instruments that communities may use, will play a part in allowing lessons to be learned by other fire-threatened communities. As we develop other parts of the toolkit, we hope that the learning will be deeper still.